During our first planning trip to Matrix at Michigan State to develop the Public Philosophy Journal, Mark Fisher and I sat down to talk with Ethan Watrall and Bill Hart-Davidson about creating the journal as an ecosystem of scholarly communication.

Ethan Watrall (aka: @Captain_Primate) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Michigan State and Associate Director of Matrix. In addition, Ethan is Director of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative and the Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool here at Michigan State.

Ethan’s research interests fall in the domain of cultural heritage informatics, with particular (though hardly exclusive) focus on digital archaeology and serious games & meaningful play for cultural heritage learning, outreach, and engagement.

Bill Hart-Davidson (aka: @billhd) is Associate Professor of Rhetoric & Writing and Director of the Rhetoric & Writing Graduate Program. He is Senior Researcher at WIDE Research at Matrix Writing in Digital Environments Research, and a co-inventor of Eli Review , a web service for coordinating and evaluating peer review. Bill is currently President of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing and in January he will become the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Letters.

The four of us discuss five functional aspects of the Public Philosophy Journal: the user profile, the open peer review process, curation, collaborative writing, and the publication itself-complete with the process by which it came into being.

[…] functionalities the journal will include. (For an idea of some of the central points we addressed, listen to this Digital Dialogue produced during the visit.) It should come as no surprise that there were several points at which […]